Splunk Extends Data to .NET Developers

Splunk announced a new set of tools aimed at .NET developers who want to extend the rich set of information that the company's tools

Splunk's tools are popular among the cloud and virtualization IT set, with its Splunk Enterprise suite, and are often categorized as operational intelligence tools. Splunk's tools dig into machine data from various source and extrapolates that information to improve the monitoring and analysis of that information to improve performance or discover bottlenecks.

New is version 2.0 of its Splunk C# SDK. The major point release appears to be somewhat of a misnomer, as the company blogs that "the new SDK is designed from scratch to take advantage of the latest advances in the .NET Platform by including rich support for async/await, and the dynamic keyword." New are the Splunk.Client and Splunk.ModularInputs packages available via NuGet.

Splunk.Client is used for connecting Splunk instances and accessing the Splunk API. Splunk highlights that the Client package includes a portable class library aimed specifically at cross-platform development, and in particular apps on mobile devices. To develop apps for use on Linux and iOS or Android devices and requires working with Xamarin's tools.

Splunk.ModularInputs is used to interacting with devices and apps and connecting to external APIs such as those from Twitter and other popular apps.

Related to the C# SDK is an extension that Splunk developed for use within Visual Studio 2013. The extension has templates for creating new .NET projects via the Splunk client and for creating and customizing C# Modular Input packages, as well as snippets for repetitive tasks that one might use often developing projects via a Splunk client.

Logging libraries are also new. These libraries will transmit log data from .NET apps to Splunk via TCP or UDP and provides .NET Trace Listeners (for use in OSS logging frameworks) and sinks for the Semantic Logging Application Block (used by Event Tracing for Windows) for simplifying the wiring of these apps together.

The tools are free and currently generally available. More details and usage guidelines are here.

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